About 18 months ago I followed this How-To: https://www.howtoforge.com/virtual-...urier-mysql-and-squirrelmail-ubuntu-12.04-lts to setup a mail server on a website I'm hosting. It has worked flawlessly for that entire time... until somewhere around this past Monday. I ran my normal aptitude update/safe-upgrade routine for this Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server that morning. I can't recall what all was updated but no other changes were made to the system so this must have triggered it. I do know that none of the updates gave me the config screens you sometimes see which ask whether you want the new package config or to keep the current one.

In any case, no email is getting out and the postfix queue is up to 1200 messages (it handles subscription and registration email for a medium sized forum community). In looking at mail.err and mail.log it seems like amavis is at the root of it... the pass-off is somehow getting confused. I apologize for not knowing more in terms of troubleshooting so I'm going to add some of the errors and hopefully someone can get me pointed in the correcty direction so as not to lose the 2000 and growing messages.

So since nobody else has experienced this in the short term it seems like it wasn't the update or nobody else has updated. The problem with that line of thinking is that I am the only one with access to this server and I wasn't tinkering.

With the help of a user of our system it's been determined that the type of stuff shouldn't be in there. In looking at older logs it wasn't in there. The question now is what is introducing that stuff into the stream and how can I fix it?